Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) involve using computer processing to extract meaningful information from natural language inputs such as human generated speech and text. One recent application of such technology is processing speech and/or text queries in mobile devices such as smartphones.
FIG. 1 shows some example screen shots of one such mobile device application, Dragon Go!, which processes speech query inputs and obtains simultaneous search results from a variety of top websites and content sources. Such applications require adding a natural language understanding component to an existing web search algorithm in order to extracting semantic meaning from the input queries. This can involve using approximate string matching to discover semantic template structures. One or more semantic meanings can be assigned to each semantic template. Parsing rules and classifier training samples can be generated and used to train NLU models that determine query interpretations (sometimes referred to as query intents).